Cooling Wort in Two Pots

Northern Brewer General
1

I split my 5 gallon batches between two pots, boiling in separate pots before cooling in a bath and recombining in a single fermenter. I’ve just gotten 2 lengths of 25’ x 3/8 tubing to make two (or one) immersion coolers, but before I get started, I’m curious if anyone has input on the best/easiest/fastest way to do the cooling.

Would it make more sense to:

A) make one 50’ cooler and cool the wort one pot at a time?
B) make two 25’ coolers, and connect the cooler in the second pot to the outflow from the cooler in the first pot?
C) make two 25’ coolers, attach a splitter to the faucet and run two streams of water simultaneously, one through each pot?

As reference, my water right now is fairly warm, around 70 degrees, and the flow isn’t that strong, around 50 seconds to pull a gallon.

I’m inclined to go with C, but I’m not sure whether the flow will be so slow as to really make the cooling drag out. And if the cooling in scenario B is only a few minutes slower, it seems like that would potentially be easier to make without leaks.

And of course, if there’s another way of rigging up an immersion cooler for two pots, I’d be happy to hear of it.

2

In general, I would recommend you go with whatever is the going to be the least work for you. But if what you want is to answer what is going to give you the best efficiency, then I would go with the two chiller option D. That’s the one where you use one coil as a pre-chiller immersed in a tub of ice water, and the output from that goes through the second which is in your 1st brew kettle. Once that is chilled down to target, move the chiller out of that pot and put it in the second one.

Second choice would be option A, as that would be more useful if you upgrade to a bigger pot where you can boil everything at once. I wouldn’t go with option C unless you have cooler water and better flow. Option B won’t work very well.